Chapter 13 #3
The stage appears on my right. Bright lights.
A platform built from shipping pallets. And up there, under the glare, a drugged omega stands swaying in a tiny white dress, her eyes vacant and a handler gripping her arm.
The announcer has stopped talking. He's staring at the chaos unfolding in his audience, microphone hanging limp in his hand.
I keep my eyes forward, racing toward the mass of parked cars on the other side.
Rows of vehicles packed onto a dirt clearing carved out of the trees. Trucks, SUVs, sedans, all crammed together at angles with barely enough room to walk between them.
Adam is ahead of me. I don't know when he passed me, but he's there, shirtless and sprinting, weaving between vehicles, pulling door handles as he goes.
Locked. Locked. Locked.
"Come on, come on, come on," Adam mutters, yanking another handle.
Locked.
Behind us, the sound of running footsteps. A lot of them. Close.
Adam grabs the handle of a silver minivan and it opens.
"Here!" He rips the sliding rear door open, and I throw myself inside, twisting so I land on the long bench seat on my back with the omega on top of me.
The van rocks from the impact, and Adam slams the door shut behind me. My head cracks against the opposite door and stars burst across my vision. The poor girl is shaking violently against my chest, her face pressed into my neck, her body radiating heat.
Adam is already in the front seat, his hands under the steering column, yanking at wires. The van is old. Ten years at least. Cloth seats, fast-food wrappers on the floor, a pine tree air freshener swinging from the mirror.
"Please." Adam's fingers work fast, twisting, stripping. "Work, you piece of shit."
Perrin appears out of nowhere, wrenching the passenger door open and throwing himself inside. He's drenched in sweat, his face white, his chest heaving so hard I can hear every breath.
Perrin’s hand finds the lock button on his door and he presses it hard.
Then again. And again. The mechanical thunk-thunk-thunk of the lock engaging and re-engaging, over and over, like a nervous tic he can't stop.
His eyes are fixed on the windshield, watching the figures moving between the vehicles.
“Fuck!” Perrin yells as a body slams into the driver's side of the van. The whole vehicle lurches sideways and the omega screams against my throat.
I glance through the window and see an alpha, eyes black, mouth open, palms flat on the glass, his face inches from mine. He's snarling, spit hitting the window.
Another one hits the rear. The van rocks forward.
"Adam!" I roar.
The engine turns over. Coughs. Dies.
"Fuck!" Adam strips another wire and touches them together.
The driver's side mirror explodes. An alpha has ripped it clean off the door, the plastic housing shattering against the ground. His hand reaches through the gap where the mirror was, clawing at the window frame.
The engine catches.
Adam slams the van into reverse, and the alpha clinging to the driver's side loses his grip, tumbling backward into the dirt. Tires scream on gravel. Adam spins the wheel, and the van fishtails, the rear end swinging wide, nearly clipping a guard who dives out of the way.
Then we're in drive, lurching forward, bouncing over ruts and rocks, the suspension groaning as Adam guns it toward the tree line.
The logging road appears between the pines. Narrow and rutted and barely wide enough for the van. Adam doesn't slow down. He points us at the gap and floors it, branches scraping along both sides of the vehicle like fingernails on a coffin.
I look down at the omega against my chest. She's curled in a ball, trembling, her eyes squeezed shut, tears tracking through the sweat on her face. Her scent is everywhere now, filling the van, thick and sweet and devastating. Pears and vanilla and something underneath that makes my chest ache.
Then I see it.
On the left side of her neck, half-hidden beneath a curtain of damp brown hair. Two crescents of broken skin, deep and bruising at the edges, blood dried in dark lines down to her collarbone.
A mating bite.
My stomach drops and my heart rate spikes as I stare at it.
It’s Cliff's bite.
I know his mark the way I know my own hands. It’s on both Perrin and Adam's necks. I've traced those crescents with my fingers more times than I can count. And now they're on this woman. This omega I didn't know existed twenty minutes ago.
He mated her.
Cliff, the most disciplined alpha I've ever known, a man who has never once made a reckless decision in his life, mated this omega.
Something surges through my chest.
It’s not anger. It's more complicated than that.
There's a heat to it. A sharp, possessive thrill that my alpha instincts latch onto before my rational mind can intervene.
An omega. A real, live, precious omega.
And she’s ours.
The thought lights up something wonderfully territorial and hungry in the base of my skull, and for one raw, unguarded second, I’m so excited I can’t breathe.
I want her in our pack, in our den, in our bed.
I want to press my nose to that bite mark and layer my scent over Cliff's until she smells like all of us.
But then I look up in the rearview mirror.
Adam's eyes reflect back at me. They’re wild and scared, and focused on the road. Perrin sits beside him, white-faced, his hand still pressing the lock on his door over and over.
My thrill cools and worry floods in behind it.
Betas aren't like us. They don't run on instinct the way alphas do. They don't get hit with a scent and become lost to primal urges. Betas need time to get used to change. Especially Adam.
He feels everything so deeply.
This could destroy him.
But there’s nothing I can do about it now.
"What about Cliff?" Perrin asks from the front seat, his eyes darting all over the forest in front of us, before turning and looking back at me. "Raff, what about Cliff?"
I stare at the ceiling of the stolen minivan, holding the mated omega I've known for less than five fucking minutes, and say the only thing I can think of.
"Just fucking drive."